Molecular Computing Network (MolCoNet)

Molecular Computing Network (MolCoNet)

In cooperation with Professor Tero Harju, University of Turku, and other 14 European groups. European Union IST FWP5, 2002-2004.

Molecular computing is a novel, exciting and a genuinely interdisciplinary research area which lies at the boundary of Computer Science and Molecular Biology. An important advantage offered by computations with bio-molecules is the massive parallelism: the number of operations that can be executed at the same time is proportional to the number of molecules involved, which is of the order of 10 to the power 19 . Also, operations which involve bio-molecules are over a billion times more energy efficient with respect to electronic chips, and the information can be stored at a density of about a billion times higher than in usual electronic computers. The major applications to massively-parallel molecular computation range from novel computer architectures in conventional hardware and novel algorithmic solutions to difficult problems to self-assembling technology and intelligent nano-scale construction. The theoretical studies involve the investigation of new computational models based on paradigms coming from bio-chemistry: the complementarity of the two strands of a DNA molecule, the signaling within and between cells, or the structural organization of cells.